Thanks to the leisurely pace at which California counts their votes, it’s still a little too early to come to massive, sweeping conclusions about the 2024 election. But if there’s one trend that’s made itself clear, it’s that young people, particularly young men, swung away from the Democrats at the presidential level, and that some sub-sections of the young male vote may have even been outright won by Donald Trump. To paraphrase Mott the Hoople: all the young dudes gave Dems bad news.

If you were following the 2024 campaign, this swing was not completely unexpected – there was a wealth of commentary regarding the growing partisan gender gap, particular among Gen Z, and how the Trump campaign invested heavily in reaching out to young male voters through “bro”-focused podcasters and media companies like Theo Von, Joe Rogan, and Barstool Sports, to name a few. But if you’re taking the long view of electoral politics in the 21st century, it is a bit more surprising – for most of the 2000s and 2010s, Democrats were the party of young people, including young men. The foreign policy and economic disasters of the Bush Administration generated a swell of anti-Republican sentiment among millennials that metastasized into support for Barack Obama, arguably the most-youth conversant politician in American history. Even if they couldn’t always count on it to deliver lasting electoral results, like in 2016, youth support for Democrats seemed to last for most of the Trump years and eventually help sweep Joe Biden to victory, only for it to ebb in 2024 and return Trump to the White House. 

The short term effects of this shift are obvious – the country will now have to endure another four years with Trump as president, as well as at least two years of a Republican controlled House and Senate – but the potential long term implications are probably even more troubling for Democrats. A serious crack in their youth support, combined with the pronounced rightward shift of Latino voters, shrinking margins in cities, and continued cratering among white non-college educated voters would force the Democratic Party to think about what a winning liberal coalition even looks like, and what messages and policies they may have to adopt or avoid to rebuild trust among the kinds of voters they used to be able to count on. 

But how, exactly, do Democrats reach out to both the young men who left them and those that were never with them in the first place? It’s a vexing question, and one that I, as a relatively young (30 is still young, right?) dude who went from being a high school Republican to a vote-blue-no-matter-who Democrat, have not been able to stop thinking about since the election. Why did this seemingly inevitable leftward drift of both my cohort and the one behind us shift so suddenly? And how can it be reversed, if at all?

Rebels With a Cause

I suspect that this apparently young male revolt against the Democratic Party is reflective of a generational shift as much as anything – an 18-year-old energized by Obama’s first campaign in 2008 is in their mid-30s now, and they’re more loyal to the party than the 18-year-olds of 2024, who were only ten years old when Trump descended that famous golden escalator and came up in an era without a similarly galvanizing Democratic figure. But within this generational divide is a cultural one that I think tells an even more important story about the election – and one that Democrats will find even harder to reverse. 

To explain by way of illustration: my freshman year of high school was in 2008, and I had gym class with a junior we’ll call Andy. The older brother of one of my classmates, Andy wasn’t a malicious presence, but he was far from a model student – loud, rude, and lewd, he was someone who probably wasn’t going to jail anytime soon, but he wasn’t exactly good at staying out of trouble, either. I wouldn’t describe him as a “liberal,” not because he was a conservative, but because I don’t know that he ever thought about politics enough to develop an ideology. And yet, the one shirt I can specifically recall him wearing was a 90s hip-hop style t-shirt with Barack Obama’s face on it (I don’t know if it was this exact shirt, but you get the idea). Fast forward 16 years later, and I’m a substitute teacher at middle school in the same town I grew up in. The only explicitly political paraphernalia I see any student sporting? Trump stickers on the laptops and hydroflasks of boys aged 12 to 14, portraying the man who tried to overturn the last election as a smirking cartoon character. 

Granted, neither Andy nor the students I sub for could vote in the elections that produced this merchandise. But the point isn’t just that Obama and Trump penetrated the culture in a way that few other politicians have. It’s that they spoke/speak to a similar rebellious impulse that appeals to young men. When Andy bought his Obama shirt, the town I grew up in was a 90% white Republican stronghold filled with plenty of people who were skeptical of Obama’s economic plans, which meant that even though he was wearing the face of a Harvard-educated lawyer on his shirt, he could still feel iconoclastic doing so. 16 years and one political realignment later, and my hometown has become one of those suburbs covered in “In this house, we believe” signs and classrooms designated as LGBTQ safe spaces. All of a sudden, liberalism and the Democratic Party became the authority, and young men looking to rebel against the establishment saw Trump as the easiest route to do so. 

No Boys Allowed?

Of course, the Democratic Party can only do so much about this – winning elections turns you into the authority, and nobody, especially no young person, likes being on the side of authority. But what the Democratic Party can do is change the way it talks about men and craft a policy platform that treats them as stakeholders, not adversaries. The discourse in left-leaning spaces concerning sexual assault and toxic masculinity kicked into overdrive after Trump’s election in 2016, and for good reason – if liberals couldn’t prevent the election of a soon-to-be-adjudicated sexual abuser, they could at least use his election to highlight the pervasive issues of sexual harrassment and assault, sparking a movement that would not only reverberate across society, but result in a record number of women being elected in 2018. 

But for all of the good that the #MeToo movement and its offshoots did, it also made the Democratic Party come off first and foremost as the party of women, and gave the impression that they treated men as an adversary to overcome. In some respects, it was sensible for Democrats to lean into this perception, especially after the reversal of Roe v. Wade – all of a sudden, an issue specifically impacting women became the most discussed issue of what figured to be a difficult 2022 midterm campaign, and helped the party stem what seemed like inevitable losses. And it’s also simply not accurate to say that the Democratic Party is solely the party of women – hundreds of men (including the outgoing president) hold leadership positions in the Democratic Party, and millions more vote for them in every election. But the upshot of this focus on women’s issues was that men were often discussed as ancillary to the Democratic base – they were allies who cast their votes to support the women in their life, not members of the coalition who would benefit directly from the party’s platform. 

Despite the Harris campaign’s emphasis on running towards this center, this man vs. woman dynamic was still indulged in at least two ill-conceived campaign ads. In one, a MAGA-coded couple heads to a polling place – once alone in the voting booth, the woman, wearing a sequence American flag baseball cap, hovers over Trump’s name before casting a knowing look at another woman across the room, eventually filling in the bubble to Harris, her (presumably) Trump-supporting husband none the wiser. In the male-targeted parallel ad, a father enters the same polling place with two of his friends, one of whom openly declares his intent to “make America great again.” But after catching a glimpse of his daughter, he also ticks the box for Harris.

The intended message of these ads is clear – your vote is a secret, and you shouldn’t be pressured by your husband or your friends to vote for Trump if you don’t want to. Perhaps that’s a message some people needed to hear. But in practice, these ads were condescending to men and women alike – they implied that the only thing preventing a woman from expressing her true political ideas was her overbearing, brutish husband; and the only thing compelling a man to vote for Harris was the interests of his daughter. In either instance, masculinity is presented as a barrier to making the “correct” decision of voting for Harris. Obama’s speech in Pittsburgh in which he more or less chided Black men for “not feeling the idea of having a woman as president” was similarly unhelpful – while he went on to explain why Harris would be a better president than Trump, even the greatest political communicator of his generation couldn’t transcend these crude gender dynamics, implying that chauvinism was the only possible explanation for why the demographic he was speaking to would choose to support the Republican nominee. The vice president went to lengths to downplay the history-making nature of her candidacy – but time after time, her campaign and surrogates couldn’t help but fall back on her gender as an adequate enough reason to both support her and shame anyone who was skeptical of her candidacy. 

Retasking and Reframing

The trickle down effect of this gendered framing of the Democratic Party is that it makes the advancement of women seem like a zero sum game in which men will inevitably lose power and status. It’s that same framing that makes writing an article like this difficult – I fully expect some people on both sides of the political divide will misinterpret it as an argument that men are the true underclass in modern society, and that Democrats should advance policies that help them claw back their lost positions at the top of the socioeconomic ladder. But that’s not the point I’m making at all – rather, I’m calling for Democrats to:

1. Recognize that, much like women, men experience challenges that disproportionately affect them; 
2. Articulate that Democratic policies can help ameliorate these challenges; and 
3. Adopt policies and messaging that addresses these challenges specifically. 

These are not original ideas – in fact I’ve more or less stolen them from Richard Reeves, a former fellow at the Brookings Institution who founded the American Institute for Men and Boys in 2023. In an op-ed published in The Washington Post earlier this year, Reeves lamented the fact that, in 13 of the 15 leading causes of death, the male mortality rate far outpaces the female mortality rate. This is particularly stark when it comes to suicide – Reeves writes that men are four times as likely to take their own lives than women, and that the suicide rate for men under 30 has risen by a staggering 40% since 2010. 

Ever the policy wonk, Reeves’ solution to these problems is some good old fashioned bureaucracy – he suggests the founding of a federal office of men’s health as well the “retasking” the White House gender policy council “so that it looks at gender both ways.” And while I, like Reeves, think that these initiatives would have a positive effect on America’s public health, I can’t help but also look at it from the cynical perspective of a political strategist as well: adopting these kinds of policies, and explicitly addressing the struggles that disproportionately affect men, won’t just lead to better health outcomes – it will also let men know that Democrats care about them. 

The power of that simple message – we care about you – should not be discounted. Anyone who’s ever been a young man will tell you that it’s an experience rife with nihilism and loneliness, one where sensitivity and introspection are discouraged, if not openly mocked. And yet, the stats around male suicide and drug abuse speak to the fact that men are clearly coping with a great deal of unexpressed pain – if the Democratic Party can acknowledge that pain and speak directly to it, not through demagoguery and misogyny, but through actual, substantive solutions, they can rebuild a sense of trust with America’s men and, in the process, win a few elections along the way. 

To reiterate, this does not mean that Democrats and liberals should abandon their commitment to combating the various gender-related disparities that negatively affect women. But they should move on from the concept of male allyship to that of a male-female partnership – one that fights for improved health outcomes, a fairer economy, and a healthier planet for all Americans regardless of gender. They have to convince men that they not only have skin in the game, but that they have something to gain from voting for the Democratic Party – and that that something is not mutually exclusive with the things that women have to gain from voting for the party as well. As a Democratic voter, I believe, deep down, that this is in fact the case – that the party wants to protect the rights and opportunities of all Americans, regardless of gender, race, religion, or orientation. But it’s time for the Democrats to do a better job of talking about it – and there’s no better time to start than now.